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It's Okay If He's Not Human

Posted on February 10, 2010

The CIA has a demon-hunting division, Navy SEALS moonlight (sorry) as werewolf killers, and vampires are running at least one major political party in this nation. (We had already guessed that last one.)

And all the demons and Seals, the werewolves and secret agents (spooks) spend their spare time having very unusual sex very elegantly.

Oh, the bags and boxes of supernatural romance we get these days! Although they are extremely informative (one of the main requirements for a successful hunter of supernormal beings is the ability to look good in a skintight black sheath…while carrying a submachine gun) they also raise all manner of questions. Can an agent really work incognito with so many tattoos? Are there any variations these books haven’t described? (Plot variations, I mean, though I understand what you’re thinking.) Between hunting down demons and jumping into the sack with humanoid elementals, do government agents ever get any sleep? Does your alderman cast a shadow?

And, most importantly, do I sort them into the science fiction/fantasy/horror section or the romance section?

People think it’s easy, you know. One volunteer told me, “I thought a romance was any book where they have a lot of sex.” Yeah, that’s why you don’t get to sort books, my dear. One bagful of old-school DAW paperbacks and you’d have no idea what to do. (I mean in sorting books; it might give you ideas in other lines of endeavor.)

I have actually already answered this one. One year I deliberately split the steamy vampires up, putting some in each of the two sections. And, do you know, the ones that were in Romance didn’t sell very well, while over in Science Fiction they evaporated like Dracula at dawn. Was it because the Romance customers were looking for something more mundane? Or were the ones in Science Fiction were being bought up by young men who wouldn’t have been caught undead in the Chick Book Section?

There was, of course, one volunteer who suggested we put up signs saying “See Also Romance” or something, to let people know about other places to search for the books they wanted. But it just wouldn’t work for this.

Vampires HATE being cross-referenced.

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